Chapter 5 #2
The tank is invisible from this angle, hidden by the familiar curve of the broken-backed filling-station canopy collapsed on top of it.
Cat thinks it fell down because the tank bashed into the supports before it stopped for ever, but the weeds have covered everything and it’s hard to tell if the damage is from a collision or just rust and age.
As we come round the corner of the bellied roof I duck under it for cover as soon as I can, out of the rain.
Cat goes to one side of the tank and I go round the other.
As I come back out into the rain from under the roof and step over a clump of dock leaves, a jay bursts into the air from right under my feet.
The shock of the sudden explosion of feathers and its harsh squawking as it wings away into the sky makes my heart jump and bang against my ribs.
I’m about to say something to Cat when I see her stock-still, standing looking up at the gun barrel of the tank and so I stop too and stare at what’s got her attention.
There’s a dead rabbit. Maybe the one I heard shrieking in the night.
But it wasn’t just foxes. Foxes would have eaten it.
Foxes wouldn’t – couldn’t – have sharpened a stick and pushed it through the back legs and then pushed the long end of the stick down the barrel of the gun so that the creature hung upside down, waiting.
Like it’s a pennant. Or a present. Fresh food that someone had left for us.
Then too many things are trying to go on in my head at the same time, but most of all as a person who’s only ever seen Cat, I’m thinking one word, and it’s so loud and unexpected in my head it feels like a betrayal of everything I’ve known, a punch that comes out of nowhere – low, fast and hard:
Someone.
I feel winded by it.
Someone.
Breath stops happening naturally. I have to make myself exhale and then inhale again.
Someone – someone who isn’t me or Cat – did that.
And that thought is enough to freeze me.
And then I shake myself out of it, dropping back into the familiar world, back into what I do know, what’s comfortable and I’m thinking like a hunter, like the me who has spent long hungry hours setting traps and snares and watching to see how and when the bait gets taken.
And so I’m already ahead of myself and thinking why did someone hang the rabbit there, and the answer is maybe to make us look at it…
And then the next thought – which is why would they want us to look at it? – cascades in, just a moment too late.
The trap doesn’t close with a snap. Instead, there’s a ghost of a rustle as something detaches from the bushes we just walked past, and I catch the movement with the edge of my eye and know the answer to the question the rabbit poses: it’s there to make us look at it – and not behind us.
Cat’s ahead of me, already moving, stepping to one side and spinning round so fast the water sprays off her bow in a wide arc as she raises it and points it at what at first seems like a human-shaped bush.
And then I see it’s a tall figure in a cape made of lots of rags that make it look like part of the landscape, like camouflage.
The cape has a deep hood, and the face is hidden in the shadows and it’s pointing something back at Cat and then it shouts words at her and no one and nothing moves – except the rain which keeps pelting down without missing a beat, as if our world hadn’t just changed for ever in that one short second.
Cat goes dangerously still, arrow aimed straight at the figure who also doesn’t waver while pointing the long metal thing in its hands right back at her.
Don’t move, says Cat out of the side of her mouth.
I can’t.
It’s like my eyes can’t make sense of it, this other person, this wrong-shaped thing in the world.
In our world. The only human I’ve ever seen, that I remember seeing, is Cat.
Cat is what a person looks like. This person is not Cat shaped, Cat sized or even Cat coloured, so he – because even though the face is hidden in the shadows of his rain hood I can see the beard jutting out of it, dripping with rain – he does not seem like a person at all.
He seems like a violation.
His voice cracks sharply through the silence, like he’s an animal barking a command. I don’t understand the words.
Mouse, says Cat. Don’t move, don’t do anything.
I’m not going to do anything. I still can’t. Not with my body. My brain is definitely trying to do too many new things at once to do anything either, let alone something complicated. Like move my body. I’m definitely frozen.
That’s a gun, Cat says.
I know it’s a gun. I’ve seen pictures. We’ve seen the old, tilted statue holding one in the ruins of the square in the town north of us plenty of times.
It’s a soldier made of metal tarnished as black as the gun in the stranger’s hands.
I know what guns can do. I know what they were made for, and most of all I know it’s pointing at Cat.
The person says something else, louder. I can hear it’s an order, but I still don’t understand the words. Maybe it’s a language. Not ours. A different one. You can tell what he means though. He wants Cat to stop pointing her bow at him. He wants her to put it on the ground.
But there’s something in Cat’s expression I’ve never seen before. It’s not fear.
It’s worse than that.
There’s a kind of fierce heat around her eyes, and though her face is tight and ticking with tension, she’s almost smiling.
It’s a kind of banked-up exhilaration and it’s about to blaze.
She’s been waiting for this moment her whole life, scared of it but prepared for it.
She’s lived so long under the shadow of a storm that she’s always known would come, so now it’s here it’s a relief because she can stop worrying, stop twitching every time she thinks she sees something in the distance, stop trying to protect us every time she scares herself with yet another false alarm.